The Make-it-work woman A qualitative investigation of young professional women’s accounts of emotional struggles and depression in gendered, neoliberal workplaces

Within public discourse and the media, young middle-class women are increasingly positioned as part of the vanguard of social change and as ‘ideal neoliberal subjects.’ At the same time, studies all over the Western world report rising rates of emotional distress among girls and young women; depression statistics consistently designate women as twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression as men. While the recent popularisation of postfeminist sense-making suggests that gendered barriers to career success and structural sexism are things of the past and that women merely need to work hard and ‘lean in’, critical feminist scholars claim that the contemporary work organisation continues to systematically marginalise and devalue women. The research I present in this thesis explores young professional women’s affective and discursive negotiations of this contradictory landscape. Located in Aotearoa New Zealand, it aims to elucidate whether and how idealised femininities such as the cultural slot of the ‘top girl’ inflect participants’ identity work and traces its potential impact on women’s experiences of emotional struggles and depression.
In order to map out the affective contours and discursive underpinnings of contemporary high-performing femininities, I conducted two studies: The first included focus group discussions around work-related pressures and challenges, and the second, individual interviews on the experience and ‘management’ of depression with a total sample of twenty-five young professional women between March and July 2017. Embedded within a feminist social constructionist framework, my analyses outline a range of normative self-constitutive practices, such as ‘putting on a brave face’, ‘ploughing through’, ‘working towards becoming more positive’ or practising self-care, which I have termed the Make-it-work woman.
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Undergirded by neoliberal, postfeminist logic, this identity space is all about keeping the adverse effects of patriarchal capitalism, and particularly workplace sexism, in check.
The implications are twofold. Firstly, by ‘making it work’, young professional women implicitly contribute to the maintenance of gendered social relations. Secondly, the inherent individualisation of emotional struggles and distress severely curtails depressed women’s chances of feeling better – or at least differently. Produced at the intersection of ‘toxic’ organisational cultures and socially sanctioned resources for self-making, the Make-it-work woman functions psychologically as a kind of survival strategy: it is the ongoing effort to ‘prove one’s worth’. The development of alternative practices must consist of both an organisational effort, through holding men accountable, and an intrapsychic process, notably a becoming aware of and emotional distancing from the demands of the Make-it-work woman.